“Why you hide face?” said Leans to One Side as he stepped in for a closer look.
“I was . . . I was wounded too.”
“Let us see if wound you have is as bad as ones we have,” said Fingerless as he extended his sword slowly to Pleckoo’s face. “As we Barley people say, problem shared is half a problem.”
Fingerless snapped the grass sash which revealed the hole in Pleckoo’s face.
“How you lose nose, brother?” asked Gravel Voice.
“Wound not looking fresh,” said Leans.
“We heard tale,” said Fingerless, “that before he wandered into Hulkren, Commander General Pleckoo was noseless slave in Slopeish midden.”
“Right. Cleaned shit pots is what heard we,” said Gravel Voice through a chuckle that revealed his bleeding gums.
Pleckoo suddenly straightened at the mention of his old life at the midden of Cajoria. A bolt of anger had pierced him and radiated through every limb.
“It is true,” Pleckoo said, his voice reverberating through the palace as his eyes opened and glittered. “Pleckoo was a nothing, a no one on the Slope, where the Wood Eater’s shrines had been desecrated with idols. But Hulkro loves the humble and brings them to the greatest heights. The more we give to Him, the more He gives to us. And you, survivors, are about to receive His greatest gift.”
Captured by his sonorous voice, the three looked stunned, then soothed, by Pleckoo’s conviction. They were not ready for the moment he swung out with his black glass sword, which cut sharp and clean through Gravel Voice’s right wrist and then down through his ankle. His severed hand landed on his severed foot as he fell on his back and twitched.
Pleckoo turned to see Leans to One Side swing his blade up and lunge, but his movements were lame. His sword came down, slow and wobbling, dragging him forward. Pleckoo stepped out of the way, then raised his own blade to slice down on the open neck. The man’s head fell, but dangled from a hinge of flesh before his body slumped to the tiles.
Fingerless was at Pleckoo now, using both his mutilated hands to clutch his sword. As their blades clashed, Fingerless whimpered. Each swing was growing weaker as his hands bled over his handle. Pleckoo pulled back, dangling his blade like bait that he then whisked away, teasing. Fingerless dropped his weapon and fell to his knees, breathing hard as he looked up with pleading eyes.
“Pick it up,” said Pleckoo.
“Cannot,” said Fingerless.
“I said pick it up!” Pleckoo roared. “No Hulkrite ever abandons his weapon.”
Fingerless reached for his sword as globs of blood grew from his finger stumps. His thumbs and pinkies wrapped around the grip. He strained to raise it up when it fell to rest on his shoulder.
“Kill me,” he said. “No life here but liquor grass. Cannot go home.”
“Are there others?” Pleckoo asked.
“Others?”
“Hulkrites. Deserters.”
“Yes. Spread through palaces. Most out now in local weeds for gathering honey grass for ferment.”
“How many?”
“Eighty, ninety, maybe one hundred. Will be back before nightfall.”
“What did they tell the women they were doing here?”
“Following orders is what we told Fadtha’s wife, Muti—sent back here to protect mound in case Barley people attack.”
Pleckoo shook his head. A hundred deserters? I can’t stay here.
“Commander . . . what you do with me?” Fingerless asked.
“I told you . . . I will fulfill Hulkro’s greatest gift. Do you accept Him as the One True God?”
“I . . . I do, Prophet.”
“Then join Him in the Promised World.”
Pleckoo gripped his sword with both hands and drove it up and into the man’s chin until the tip scraped the ceiling of his skull. After withdrawing his sword, Pleckoo looked at the blood and brains that clung to its blade. He walked towards Gravel Voice, who suddenly flattened to offer his chest. “Do it,” he said, but Pleckoo, infuriated, screamed and grunted and hacked at the man’s face, slicing away his nose before plunging his sword into the open throat.
Pleckoo walked to the loungers and found the men had made a makeshift altar to a Seed Eaters’ deity woven from barley fibers—perhaps a grain goddess with the leafy wings of a katydid. They had offered Her a bowl of their green spirit, which they surely drank a moment later. He kicked the idol off its pedestal and it landed near the piles of the men’s armor, which he went to and sorted through to find pieces that fit him. In Fadtha’s garment room he found riding gloves with fresh scents, a gossamer cape, a captain’s helmet, a full-length mirror, and a sealed barrel of fine white paint and brushes.
After he scraped himself clean and coated himself in fresh paint, Pleckoo looked in the mirror and was reminded that he was a noseless monster. He searched with fury through the chamber’s treasure barrels, kicking them over, scattering their contents, and trampling through a fortune of jewels and carvings until something that didn’t glimmer caught his eye—a mask facing down. He turned it over to see that the mask was inlaid with slices of orange onyx and veins of black obsidian in a pattern that resembled the wings of a milkweed butterfly. It was a Britasyte bauble and likely worn by a woman in their scandalous dancing spectacles—but the straps were intact and he tied it on.
Pleckoo heard the rustling flaps of the portal as Muti and other women pushed in, panicked and out of breath from riding up the mound. They halted before the corpses, shocked, it seemed, for a second time, and stared at Pleckoo.
“Did you ride an ant up here?” he asked. “That’s forbidden to a woman.”
“Did not steer. Only rode.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Look out window.”
He threw aside the curtain of a quartz-slice window and saw that the ghost ants had left their parades and were scattered in panic throughout the humans’ shelters as they raced to the mound’s peak. Above him he heard the clamor of their claws on the chamber’s roof as they raced over the palace, then under the rain shield to retreat down their tunnels.
Looking out to the distance, he wondered what made the ants flee instead of fight, when something appeared on the distant sand: a moving arrow-shaped mass of crawlers hauling sand-sleds. He knew what they were: roaches. The ants of Cajoria hid like this when the Britasytes were passing through, he thought. Has Anand found me? He saw that the roaches had halted in unison, controlled by the men who rode them.
“What happened to these men?” Muti shouted, her eyes darting over the corpses.
“What?” Pleckoo said through a gasp, barely able to turn from the window.
“Heard me, you did! These men have been killed—by you!”
“Hulkro wanted them dead,” Pleckoo answered decisively.
“Why?”
“They blasphemed against the Termite and returned to their idols. They’re cowards who ran from the war.”
“How you know this?”
Pleckoo turned to her and the other women as sunlight from the window radiated through his cape and shone on the fresh paint of his skin. The mask he wore was orange, like the rising sun, and he imagined they saw it as bright and warm.
“You have kept faith, Muti. You and these women,” he said in his richest voice as he felt his connection with the divine. “Hulkro has told me of your attentions at His shrine, of your thousands of prayers which rise like a perfume to please Him.”
“Who are you?” Muti asked.
“Don’t you recognize the Second Prophet?”
She gasped and blinked.
“I did not, Commander. Forgive,” she said, and fell to her knees. The other women followed her example.
“You are forgiven. Rise.” Pleckoo opened his arms and Muti walked towards him and into his embrace.
“The Termite has chosen you, Muti. You must protect this mound, protect the ghost ants that live here during this time of . . . uncertainty.”
“Chosen me?” M
uti said.
“Yes,” said Pleckoo. “Don’t you feel it? You are His Entrusted.”
He pulled away from her, looked in her eyes. She began to shake, her eyes filling with tears as she stumbled from a faint.
“You have been reborn in the spirit of the Termite. Look to Him, seek His counsel. He will advise you until my return. Now, let us go and see what mischief these infidels on the backs of roaches have brought to our Holy Land.”
With no ants to ride, it was a long walk before Pleckoo and the women, slowed by their jewels and shrouds, reached the clearing where the roaches had rested. Under a cluster of yellowing barley clumps, Pleckoo sighted a large, squat barrel, the lid of which was missing to reveal a yellow goop that smelled of honey and insect fat. The young boys riding stick ants were gathered around it, staring.
“Who left this here?” Pleckoo shouted.
“Yellow men,” said the oldest boy.
“Did you talk to them?”
“Shouted at us, but not our tongue. Made gestures we should not eat this. Maybe it makes us itchy?”
“Itchy?’
“Yes. Yellow men scratched a lot. In pain. Legs covered in big red bumps.”
Pleckoo pondered that as he walked towards the barrel when he realized the ghost ants were reemerging from the mound. They were back on the downward trail to a food find, and several smaller ants had detected the barrel and raced to gather and slurp from it. “No!” shouted Pleckoo as he used his sword to stab through the ants’ eyes and through to their brains. “Wrap up that barrel now!” he shouted, and both boys and the women obeyed by pulling over a wax-embedded tent canvas with attached ropes. “Let no one, ant or human, eat from this barrel. Gather the slaves, now, and make a deep pit to bury it—and these dead ants! Don’t let them leave here or get eaten by their sisters.”
“What is it?” Muti asked.
“Poison,” Pleckoo answered, not completely sure. “A slow-acting poison.”
Perhaps this is what Anand used to exterminate the ghost ants of Zarren!
Just as Pleckoo had given his order, a cluster of men in flaking white paint came out of the weeds with trucking ants hauling sled-carts of cut honey grass. They looked at Pleckoo, at his orange mask, and wondered who he was. Did they recognize him as their Second Prophet?
As Pleckoo stared back, he wondered if they would fall in submission or attack him with their scythes.
Chapter 2
Filthy Squirters
The men standing before Pleckoo were wobbling from drunkenness. Some had grins on their faces, others looked sleepy or irritated. A tall, muscular man with an eyepatch looked deeply angry. He shouted at Pleckoo in the Seed Eaters’ tongue.
“Do you speak Hulkrish, brother?” Pleckoo asked.
“Brother?” said the man in slurred Hulkrish. “Bledtha is my name. Dead is my brother Fadtha. Who is it who wears my brother’s cape and helmet?”
Muti, standing nearby, stepped forward. “He is . . .”
“Keep quiet, woman,” said Bledtha. “I ask him, not you.”
“I am a Good Hulkrite, brother,” Pleckoo answered, looking at Muti as she lowered her head and stepped back.
“You wear Britasyte mask—why? You some lovely roach-girl come to dance for us while we jerk our pissers?”
The others laughed as Pleckoo knelt, lowered his head.
“Forgive my trespass, brother Bledtha. I am just a wayward warrior. On the night of the battle for the Slope, my mount fled in fright from a tree-tall roach wrapped in fire—my ant was uncontrollable. I fell asleep on her head and days later woke up to see she had returned to this mound. If you are the ruler here, all I request is that you let me go.”
“From curl of your tongue I guess you are Slopeite.”
“I was. I seek Urtkess-dozh, west of here, which I am told is a refuge for Slopeites in Hulkren. If you will excuse me, brother, I was leaving.”
“Not yet. Leave behind stolen things.”
“I . . . I will.”
“And then dance for us.”
The men laughed.
“Dance? I don’t . . .”
“Sure can you. Do us squirmy little roach dance and shake your rump.”
Pleckoo stood, raised his obsidian sword. “A Hulkrite does not dance,” he said. “And not for other men.”
“No Hulkrites left,” said Bledtha. “Hulkro is dead, Tahn is dead. For all I know and hope, Pleckoo dead too.”
“Pleckoo not dead!” Muti shouted. “He stands there now—behind that orange mask!”
Bledtha turned his head to look at Muti. He seemed unaware, a moment later, that a sharp, thin blade had cut through his neck until his head slid off his body. Pleckoo spun, whirling his blade through the men who fell or scattered. He reached the leg of a trucking ant and climbed up its spikes. Using his sword, he severed the ropes that bound the ant to a cart and then mounted her head. “Help me, Hulkro,” he said aloud, and pressed the index finger of his gloved hand near the root of her antenna. The ant jolted off into a spiral and outraced the men running after her. After Pleckoo sheathed his sword, he prodded both antennae to achieve a straight, swift crawl to the outer weeds of the mound.
Muti felt numb, and then a growing rage. She was unsure if she was walking towards another cluster of corpses or if it was her ghost who had left her body to take a look. She became aware that other women had joined her, wailing as they searched the faces of the dead. One of them, barely a woman, screamed and began to wail. “Husband!” she cried out in Hulkrish. “Killed by that Slopeite!”
“He is not a Slopeite,” Muti answered in the old language. “That was the Second Prophet. He has blessed us with a visit.”
Muti walked towards one of the drunkards who had crawled into the shade of some grass to nap, too drunk to acknowledge or care that his kinsmen were dead. She picked up his sawing-scythe, pressed the sharp end of its hook under his neck, and kicked him.
“Ow!” he screamed. “I was sleeping, woman!”
“Tell me the truth,” she said, stepping on his chest and gouging him with the hook. “Are you a deserter?”
“Get off me, witch! I know what you were in the old country—why you had to take up in Hulkren.”
“I have never been a witch. The Second Prophet has left me in charge. He has seen my connection, a divine tunnel, to Lord Termite.”
“The Second Prophet? More like Big Impostor. Pleckoo prophesied a great victory against the Slope, something he would achieve in one night’s battle!”
“You are from Durxict,” she said, “judging from your accent.”
He shrugged.
“What’s your name?”
“Suck me,” he said.
She was breathing hard. “Suck Me, is it? Are you a deserter, Suck Me? Did you run from the war?” She pressed the hook in deeper, drawing blood.
“Don’t you understand, flea-spawn? We lost the war. It was over in a night. Our old country entered the war. The Hulkrites battling in the East were unprepared, without breathing masks, for one thing and they choked on the harvester ants’ toxins. Some of us who grew up in the Barley Lands survived—the ones who were used to their poisons.”
“And in the West?”
“They lost too. From what we heard it was even worse—slaughtered by the Beetle Riders in the Pine Lands.”
“So all of you, you men, have been lying to us.”
“We’ve been protecting you from the truth. You’d know that—if the Termite really spoke to you.”
Protected from the truth! She had an urge to kill this man, to jerk the blade up his chin and rip his jaw out. For a moment, she felt the urge to kill all men, these hairy monsters that were always beating them and inserting their squirting, filthy parts before putting them to work. And now it was men who were lying to them, hiding that they had failed in their only real task: to protect them from enemy nations. And those are nations with their own men, she thought, who would treat us even worse.
She looked down a
t Suck Me, who was heaving and frightened but failing to hide his contempt for her. Just what do I do with this one? she was asking herself when he kicked out the scythe from her hand, grabbed her ankle, and yanked her to the ground. She punched at his face as he crawled on top of her, attempting to grab her neck.
“Kick him!” she shouted to the other women, who hesitated as his thumbs gouged into her throat. “Kick him, before he kills me!” she wheezed.
The women circled the two of them. The first kicks were weak and tentative. Suck Me growled and grabbed one woman’s leg and bit deep into her ankle. She screamed, then retaliated with a sharp kick to his nose. The others followed her lead, kicking the man’s ears, his neck, his ribs.
“You bloody slits!” he shouted as the foot bashing continued. He was unable to move, and they heard the sound of his ribs cracking with the crash of their feet.
“Stop!” Muti shouted. “Turn him over.”
The women obeyed, pushing him onto his stomach as Muti retrieved her scythe.
“You may have your uses yet, Suck Me,” she said, and gouged below his calf with the scythe to snap his tendons. She scraped the blood off the blade, raised it up, and looked around to find the women and the boys were staring at her, frozen in fear and awaiting her next order.
Chapter 3
The Judgment of Worm
Pleckoo steered the ant east through a bleak stretch of drying weeds alternating with patches of rough and upended sand. He looked at the sun and hoped he was heading to Urtkess-dozh, where he might find some shade, something to eat and drink, and some comfort . . . for as long as he could hide his face.
As the day stretched on and the sun grew hotter, Pleckoo’s mount grew weak and slow and was likely as thirsty as he was. In a bleakness of dust-covered sand, the ant halted and her antennae drooped. She was about to collapse.
In the distance he saw a fading mallow plant. Its crenate, kidney-shaped leaves were yellowing at the ends of stems that still held some green. Pleckoo urged the ant over the jagged sand to enter into the plant’s shade, then tied the ant’s hauling rope to a stalk as a tether. After dropping to the ground, Pleckoo thrust his sword into the base of the plant and twisted it in hope that a bead of sweet water might bloom from the cut.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 2
